Lying To The Neighbours

Nasty effects with tracker-less BitTorrent

Distributed Hash Tables implement Routing and Addressability in large P2P networks. In the Kademlia adaption for Bittorrent a peer's address (NodeID) is to be generated randomly, or more appropriate: arbitrarily. Because randomness isn't verifiable, an implementation can advertise itself with popular NodeIDs or even change them on a per-packet basis.